Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (40 page)

“Petunia,” I scolded.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Okay,” I admitted, realizing this was the only time I could think of where two men desired me. At least on the West Coast.

Mr. Irldale and Lorne (Horny Lorney? Forlorn Lorne? I couldn’t gauge how long he’d been caged or if he even was) opened the balcony door. What were they talking about? Surely not the cage. What then? Films? Wives?

Cigars. They were still talking about them when they came in, a cold blast of air washing over where Terrance and I sat on the couch, the air bringing with it the stink of tobacco. When Lorne sat in the free seat beside me I could feel the cold coming off his shoulders. The hand he put on my knee, briefly, while choosing a chocolate from the tray with his other, was warm.

On the one hand, I felt I should have turned down the whole movie night get together and gone off with Mr. Irldale, maybe to that apartment of his in…I couldn’t remember just then. Maybe I’d had three glasses. Petunia was one of those types who believes wine glasses should never fall below the optimist’s
or
pessimist’s level. And there was this: I was holding a glass of the liquor—something honey-like, and I’d already been sipping it. I remembered that night with the Lithuanians and put the glass down, vowing to be done drinking for tonight.

So, back to that one hand: I could have made a night of it with Mr. Irldale instead of coming up here, or I could have made a night of it with Terrance. And by night of it, I want to clarify that I’d have been perfectly happy with a nice dinner, conversation, maybe some TV. I’m not implying that I had to jump into bed with either of the men. (Which is, of course, a lie. I really, really, really wanted the whole thing: climbing under the cold sheets, the weight of one of them on top of me, the feel of their hands running across my skin, the warmth of a tongue, the smell of their necks. To be held and pleasured, held and pleasured. Instead, I was here, trapped frustratingly between the two.)

“Your friends are well-stocked,” Mr. Irldale said, smacking his lips after emptying his glass. “I haven’t had this in ages. Cheers,” he said, after being refilled.

I reached for my glass and the gulp was halfway down before I realized it. I emptied it for good measure and put it down on the floor, out of sight and out of Petunia’s mind.

I won’t bore you with the details of that evening because what happened later has somehow erased most of the jokes and sports talk that carried the evening into the early hours of the morning. Terrance was cold to me and I was cold right back at him. I tried my best to ignore Petunia’s little head nods and raised eyebrows directed at me.

“We should get going,” I said, when the talk crossed the uncomfortable boundary into mentions of past lovers.

“Yes,” Mr. Irldale said, slapping his knee. “I’ve enjoyed all of your company so much.” He was sincere. There was something about a fella like him that could make friends out of strangers quickly—a trait I’ve often envied.

“You
stay!
” Petunia commanded. “There’s plenty of bedrooms.”

The idea of an overnighter with Mr. Irldale and possibly Terrance in the same apartment made my head swoon. And not in a good way. I could picture a night of no sleep while the men in my life (even if one had just entered the picture hours ago) kept me from slumber. And then the thought occurred to me that I could satisfy myself with Terrance first, then creep away and dare myself to rouse Mr. Irldale. I shivered free from my little reverie. It was so late now that the part of my brain that usually kicked in for the late late show of nighttime fantasies was making an appearance while I was still fully awake. What a preposterous idea: sleeping with two men in one night. Right?

“Okay!” Mr. Irldale said, just like that. “I’d be happy to. I’d have a heck of a long cab ride otherwise,” he added.

My eyes widened. The other part of me felt a little hurt I hadn’t received even a look from him about the matter. How did he know I didn’t have a night of fun planned beyond the footprint of Petunia’s building?

“All right,” I said, getting up and rousing my willpower simultaneously. That little fantasy of an overnighter evaporated under the weight of reality. I wasn’t here alone, after all. My son was downstairs. “
I’m
going to get going,” I said, the words coming out all too smugly.

“See you tomorrow?” Terrance asked.

“You two an item?” Mr. Irldale asked, a tone of teasing in his voice.

“No,” I said, too quickly. “Friends.”

“Romans,” Lorne said.

“Countrymen!” Petunia added, then drained her glass.

“Finished now?” I asked. “We’re
good
friends,” I said, squeezing Terrance’s shoulder. “And maybe tomorrow,” I whispered into his ear.

“See you tomorrow?” I asked Mr. Irldale.

“Meetings. Give you a call?”

I rummaged through the gritty, paperclip-strewn bottom fold of my purse and found a pen. I pulled out one of my business cards–the same ones I’d been distributing all over the city at publishers and agencies—and wrote my cell number below the call forwarding number I’d been giving out to prospective employers.

“Adios sweet Eloise,” Mr. Irldale said, pocketing the card and raising his glass.

Petunia hurried off to the kitchen and met me at the elevator with a little white bag. “For the road,” she said.

I looked inside. More chocolates.

“Going to let him out tomorrow?” she asked.

The elevator doors opened and I looked back at the scene: Lorne, Mr. Irldale and now Terrance doing some kind of male-bonding thing, hands on each others shoulders, some sports chant.

“Maybe,” I said. “But probably not.”

“Ah,” Petunia said as I stepped into the elevator. “Then goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” I said, and a moment later I was down in the lobby. And then, feeling strangely alone, I went back into the elevators to the Lithuanian’s floor. I did have my son to take home, after all. And be kind of your assessment of me as a mother, would you? Don’t forget I’m omitting most of that aspect of my life for the sake of privacy and for the sheer boredom it would be for you to read about the intricacies, emotions, and banalities of being a mother. If you are one, you know. If you aren’t, why spoil your possibilities with another’s limitations.

At the Lithuanian’s floor I was greeted by bright lights and the thump of music and the bells and bumpers of the apparently still-ongoing pinball tournament. I found my son asleep in a bean bag at a far corner of the office space, clutching his phone. Before him was a view mostly of the office space reflected in the glass, the cubicles and desk chairs and rectangles of monitors hovering over the night. I honed my focus onto the glass and noticed that it had begun to mist; little rivulets of dark twisting water ran down the exterior glass. I kicked the bag and it rebuffed my foot, though it hardly budged my son. Petunia’s daughter Eli sat in an adjacent bean bag, finger stroking her phone’s screen.

“What happened to the night owl?” I asked, nodding toward my son.

“He bowed out early in the tournament,” Eli said. “A real downer after that debacle.” There again was Eli’s strange stilted speech, striving to make her sound as old as possible.

“Time to go home,” I said, kicking the bean bag again, lovingly, if you can imagine such a thing.

“Let him sleep,” Eli implored with an exhausted air. “He’ll come upstairs in the morning.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“I already told Petunia I’m sleeping down here.”

Petunia
. What a strange thing to call your mother by her first name.

“You may go home,” Eli said. “I’ll look after him.”

I bit the inside of my lip, deliberating. I tossed the bag of chocolates into her lap. “Okay. Tell him I’ll call him first thing in the morning, though,” I said.

“Aye Aye, Cap’n,” Eli said.

So! Strange!

I sat in the lobby until my taxi pulled up, then sat in the back as we drove the few miles to my apartment. It felt so wrong to be going home alone. And I mean without my son. I’ve never—and never would—take a man home with me while my son was there. I looked all over the back seat for my misplaced bag of chocolates, just so I could have a taste, and then remembered I’d given them away. Make it three glasses of wine and some of that liquor. And now that I recall, the chocolates I’d had from the tray had hearts of liquor, too.

Seeing my apartment windows dark and still curtain-less from within the idling taxi, I kicked myself, so to speak. How could I be coming here alone? You single mothers know how rare such an event can be. “Back,” I said. “I need to go back.”

“Address?” the driver asked.

“Where we just were,” I said. He needed new windshield wipers. How could he see anything?

“Address.”

“Just turn around,” I said, and began pointing out lefts and rights and once (admittedly) had to have him back-track a block. I knew only that I wanted to bring
someone
home tonight.
My mother told me to pick the very best one and you are not it!
Terrance, my poor sufferer. No, the right kind Mr. Irldale. But what would he surmise of the shabby abode of one Ms. Eloise Spanks?
And why was I finding myself thinking in the stilted way that Eli spoke?
I was catching her disease.

I buzzed myself up to the Lithuanian’s floor to check once more on my son. Maybe a part of me was hoping to find him awake and wanting to go home, to sabotage my plans for the evening, to take away my choice, forcing me to be the good, unselfish mother. But no, he
and
Eli were asleep, each chastely in their respective bean bags, the sky clearing there in their glass corner showing them lights they could not see, stars they didn’t know twinkled.

I entered the access code in the elevator to go up one floor and braced myself for all of them to be a couple drinks more in. I didn’t need sex tonight. I just wanted someone to pass out beside me. Some warmth for the night’s remaining hours.

I also braced myself to make a choice, though I felt that choice already made for me. Mr. Irldale had meetings—was I important enough for him to reschedule if need be? After all, he
had
spent three-thousand dollars to find me. But he’d never struck me as the kind of man in a rush. That one time we’d made love, back at his house, it had been so slow and gentle, so unhurried by that dragon called passion, though hardly passionless I should add. And there was this: I couldn’t exactly walk out with Terrance, could I? What would that do to Mr. Irldale’s perception of me? What I hoped for was to find Mr. Irldale already retired for the evening, and to rouse Terrance and bring him home to my empty apartment, free of the dangers of rabid Canadian roommates that would meet us at his. And there at home I’d free him and arouse him, and thank him for his patience and his devotion. My heart softened and made its choice, the thoughts of this paragraph communicated wordlessly, a feeling, a knowing. Terrance.

What I was met with as the elevator doors opened was a darkened apartment and, coming clear through the kitchen, sailing through the living area, resonating out from the far, far end of the apartments where the bedrooms were, this call: “Yeah cowboy. That’s the stuff. Whoa.
Whoa!
Okay. C’mon. Giddy up!” Petunia.

One part of me, that fast-fading innocent part of me, was thinking I’d see Petunia at another showing of a western. The other part of me that grew in percentage from half to whole as I walked cautiously down the hallway, passing one empty bedroom after another, was that I’d walk into something that would hurt me. Just the sight of it would hurt me. Still I walked. Ignorance is bliss, but only if you’re completely ignorant. Hints spoil the dumb happiness.

“C’mon cowboys,” Petunia said.

I turned the corner and saw Petunia’s master bedroom, and there, first in the wall of closeted mirrors, and then boring directly onto my eyes, a fair stampede of human nakedness. I had to hold on to the wall.

“Oh God,” Terrance said, seeing me enter the bedroom and stealing the words from my mouth more swiftly than a thief. Which is also what he’d done to the remaining soft part of my heart for him.

“Giddy up,” Petunia said, unaware.

I counted the bodies on the bed. On the bottom was Terrance lying face up, his uncaged penis within Petunia who bucked and ground against him. And there behind Petunia, readying his cock to enter her as well was…

“Eloise!” Mr. Irldale said. “Back for the show?”

I jumped, startled, and saw Mr. Irldale there in a corner of the room, seated in a leather chair with a cocktail in
each
hand. Fully, thank-godfully, clothed.

I looked back up and there were three faces turned to me now. Terrance, Petunia and Lorne, her husband the ass fucker.

My hands felt their way over to the empty chair beside Mr. Irldale. I felt my legs buckle a little, felt the floor dip. I sat down and didn’t move. I’d come up here with plans in my head as good as planted in concrete, and here they were all broken, rubble. My Terrance.

“Terrance,” I said.

Was I hurt? I didn’t know. I didn’t
feel
hurt. I was still in shock. His cock, that thing I’d kept caged now for weeks, slid out from the shadow of Petunia’s rather illustrious ass, illustrious both for its size and the tattoo I could see on the near-facing cheek.

“C’mon cowboy,” Petunia said, reaching back and replanting Terrance’s penis within her. “Mama’s not at the coral yet.”

Lorne was taking my appearance as a chance to rest, it seemed, and Petunia waved an arm back to slap him. He reaching over first for a bottle and squeezed some lubricant into the mix. “Yes ma’am,” he said.

“That’s cold,” Terrance said.

“It’s amazing,” Mr. Irldale said, leaning over to me.

I took the glasses from his hands and put them on the floor. He looked fairly plastered. “I didn’t take you for a voyeur,” I said.

“Well I’ve never had the opportunity!”

“Or an invitation,” Lorne said from the bed, snapping shut the lube.

I put up a hand to block my view of the bed. “I thought that was you on top,” I whispered to Mr. Irldale. I caught Mr. Irldale’s eye and I didn’t know what I saw. It unnerved me. Was he wanting to join that pigpile? Was he wanting to leave? Neither, it seemed. As for me, though, there went the idea of Terrance spending the night tonight. Or ever.